Takeaways from Sean Si’s “I’m Not Doing SEO”: A #SEOSummit Recap

SEJ’s Philippine team was privileged to attend last Saturday’s SEO Summit and meet the speakers. Among them is Sean Si, a Filipino motivational and leadership speaker and the founder of SEO Hacker, a Philippine-based company that provides Internet Marketing and SEO services.

“I’m Not Doing SEO”

While the event is all about SEO, Sean talked about how the art of sales can pump up your business’ online marketing campaign. According to him, “Online marketing is bringing your brand from the throne to the hearts and minds of people.”

In order to achieve that, you need to find the right arena for your business. How? Through content marketing!

Content marketing comes in many forms but they all have common denominators:

It deals with quality

It allows you to get your message out right

It helps improve your branding

It allows you to touch the hearts and souls of your audience

It brings in a lot cash!

In relation to this, Sean talked about the various forms of content marketing and how we can take advantage of it.

Blogging

Blogging, according to Sean, has the longest lifespan and makes the strongest impact. That’s why it is very important that you only publish valuable posts. Valuable means work that showcases how you handle your own brand (because your potential clients won’t believe you if you don’t practice what you preach) and what you can do for them—your target clients. Otherwise, you’ll just be part of the noise on the Internet.

Email Marketing

It may sound old school, but Sean opined that email marketing is an effective means of promoting your content. It allows you to keep your audience updated. Plus, you’re able to nurture prospective clients and sell to your existing clients. Simply put, you’re missing out on a lot of things if you’re not doing email marketing.

SEO

I always thought that content marketing aids a business’ SEO campaign, but Sean taught us (the SEO Summit attendees) otherwise. From the word itself, “content marketing”, he said you have to market your content. How? By doing SEO. It’s his way of saying we should put user intent above all else before we stuff our content with keywords and internal links.

User Experience

Make sure what ever you are promoting is clear and easy to use, be it a new product/service or you’re just informing your audience that you’ve got a website update. It’s imperative that whatever you promote enables usability or you’ll drive your clients and audience away.

[If] the people who built the site didn’t care enough to make things obvious—and easy—[it] can erode our confidence in the site and the organization behind it.

Social Media

In my opinion, this is where all online marketing craze is coming to. Let’s face it; every business makes it a point to have and promote their social media presence. Why not? It enables brand distribution and familiarity, which promotes brand retention to their target audience. However, you have to do your social media campaign right or it won’t get you any where.

The Philippine SEO Community with the SEO Summit speakers

Company Profile

This is another aspect of content marketing that I’m really glad I learned from Sean. According to him, creating a company profile is not just writing an About Us page, but also documenting how you and your team do things. More than supporting your content marketing campaign, it gives your company a face and humanizes your brand. A great way to take advantage of this is by sharing your company’s start up story.

For Sean, content marketing is more than just promoting your brand online through text, images, audio, and videos. It is a great tool to reach out to people and understand what they need, as well as find ways on how your brand can help them.